Lena, however, has had problems asserting herself for a long time. As a child, she tried to control her life by restricting the amount of food that she ate. By the time she was a teenager, her obsession with food had turned into anorexia. People who suffer from this condition starve themselves — sometimes to death. It's overwhelmingly a disease of teenage girls.
Lena is still starving herself. She is so thin, in fact, that her mother complains that she has become "so thin now you cannot see her. She like a ghost, disappear." Harold doesn't notice this, either. Lena tries to blame her inability to assert herself on her background. Being Chinese-American, she thinks, makes her "naturally" timid and prone to having feelings of guilt. Rose, her friend, will have none of this rationalization. Rose says, "Why do you blame your culture, your ethnicity?" Lena suggests that it's a problem that all women of her generation face. "I was reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because it's all diminishing returns after a certain age," she says. Her mother provides the solution: "Then why don't you stop it?" She is referring, of course, to both the table and the marriage. The table was sure to collapse; the marriage seems doomed to fail. "It's such a simple question," Lena realizes. Yet she backs off from saying what must be said. She initiates the fight with Harold but collapses into tears before she can fully make her point. Like a ghost, she lacks the strength to save herself.
